DATELINE NEW YORK: Filmmaking, writing and directing 101 (03/09/03)

DATELINE NEW YORK: Filmmaking, writing and directing 101

by Helen Smindak

Art exhibits and other events are making their bid for attention, but films and filmmakers are in the forefront of Ukrainian cultural activities in this round-up of arts and entertainment news in the Big City.

Lisa Cholodenko's latest feature film, "Laurel Canyon," opened in New York and Los Angeles this past Friday. Brooklyn-based filmmaker Roxy Toporowych has begun work on a documentary about folk dancing that focuses on the Syzokryli Ukrainian Dancers. Hollywood filmmaker Paul Maslak, whose work was discussed in the January 26 "Dateline," tells us how he got into filmmaking and offers tips on breaking into the film business.

"Laurel Canyon"

Set against a background of sunbleached southern California landscape and Brit-pop band music, a rigorously honest exploration of relationships between people with wildly divergent world views is the focus of Lisa Cholodenko's second feature film "Laurel Canyon."

Ms. Cholodenko, a Manhattan-based writer and director whose grandparents came from Ukraine, says this film is about fidelity, all aspects of it - fidelity between parents and children, and fidelity between lovers. She notes that there's a connection between "Laurel Canyon" and her first feature film, "High Arts," since both deal with the complications of intimacy.

The new film, released by Sony Classics, stars the eye-catchingly attractive actress Frances McDormand as Jane, a veteran record producer with a carefree lifestyle who's trying to come up with a hit single for a British band whose lead singer, Ian (Alessandro Nivola), is her much younger lover.

Her serious, conservative son, Sam (Christian Bale), and his equally conservative fiancee, Alex (Kate Beckinsdale), both recent graduates of Harvard's medical school, are thwarted in their plans to live in Jane's soon-to-be vacant home when Jane decides to continue her work with the band in her home recording studio. Alex begins to feel seduced by Jane and Ian, while Sam becomes vulnerable to the attractions of fellow medical resident Sara (Natascha McElhone).

The film takes its name from its California setting, Laurel Canyon, a hippie area between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley that Ms. Cholodenko describes as "attractive to people who are less conventional or are interested in being identified with a culture that is less conventional. It held an endless curiosity for me when I was a kid."

Ms. Cholodenko is familiar with California; she was raised in Los Angeles and worked as an assistant editor on studio features before moving to New York in 1992. She made short films, including "Dinner Party," which won the UK's Channel 4 TX prize, while working for an MFA in screenwriting and directing at Columbia University.

"High Art," screened at the 1998 Director's Fortnight at Cannes, won several awards that year, including The Jury Prize at Deauville, France, and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance. The film received several Independent Feature Project (IFP) nominations, and its star, Ally Sheedy, won the IFP Best Actress award and other honors.

Ms. Cholodenko has directed episodes of NBC's "Homicide," HBO's "Six Feet Under" and ABC's "Push, Nevada."

A documentrary on dance

Independent film writer/director Roxy Toporowych, who hails from Parma, Ohio, and now makes her home in New York City, has started work on a documentary film about the Syzokryli Ukrainian Dancers of New York.

Ms. Toporowych, 26, who's been involved with ballet and Ukrainian folk dance since age 5 (she was a member of Cleveland's Kashtan dance group), has started work on a feature-length documentary that will bring "one of the most beautiful, exciting and spirited dance forms in the world" to mainstream audiences in the U.S. and abroad. Film festivals, cinemas and public television broadcasters such as PBS and BBC will be the screening targets.

She is excited about showing the world the beauties and variety of regional Ukrainian dance forms and the emotions registered in folk dances, from the clownish "Povzunets" to the celebratory "Hutsul Wedding" and the glorious "Hopak." From her years with the Kashtan dance ensemble and the past 18 months as a Syzokryli dancer, Ms. Toporowych is well acquainted with the exuberance as well as the footwork and movements involved in Ukrainian dancing.

Embracing the history of Ukrainian dance here and abroad, the film will include the founding of Syzokryli by renowned prima ballerina Roma Pryma Bohachevsky, Ms. Bohachevsky's career, Syzokryli workshops and dance camps, and the participation of Ukrainian dancers in various professional productions of the Christmas classic "The Nutcracker." Ukrainian dance classes in public schools will also be covered.

Almost 24 hours of footage has been shot at rehearsals and performances since September, and more work will be done this spring and summer at the Ukrainian Festival in the East Village and at various dance camps and workshops. Interviews and shadowing of individual dancers will be scheduled.

Ms. Toporowych has turned to two friends for assistance in her yearlong project - Michael McDonough does shooting if the necessary equipment is provided for him, and Eric Gold is planning to put together a five-minute teaser to screen to potential funders.

She estimates that the documentary will cost about $8,000, covering everything from DV tapes to rental of additional equipment and post-production editing, and says she is looking for financial assistance. "Maybe someone works at Apple computers and can get me a discount on equipment; perhaps I'll throw a fund-raising party with Soomska vodka supplying the drinks," she muses. Neither she nor her friends are receiving any payment for their work.

Ms. Toporowych has just opened a non-profit status account at the Selfreliance Federal Credit Union of New York so that anyone interested in helping to fund this ambitious undertaking can lend a hand. Checks should be made payable to Ukrainian Chorus Dumka Inc. ("Syzo Documentary" may be included in the memo section) and mailed to Roxy Toporowych, 73 N. Eighth (No. 5), Brooklyn, NY 11211. All donations are tax-deductible; a receipt with the tax-deductible ID number will be mailed to all donors.

The Ohio native, who became involved in making short films and videos during her high school years, came to New York to study and graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1998 with a B.F.A. in film and television. Her student films were shown at independent festivals, including Johns Hopkins University Fest and the Athens International Festival.

Following several months of travel across Europe and Eastern Europe, with extended stops in London and Prague, Ms. Toporowych began work in the art department of NBC's "Saturday Night Live" show. She also pursued art department/set decorating work on feature films such as "Party Monster," starring Macaulay Culkin and Seth Green (to be released this spring) and worked on post-production editing at New York Times Television on the shows "Code Blue" and "Trauma: Life in the ER."

She's now writing her second screenplay (set in 1950s Cleveland), and continues to do freelance work on feature films while working on the Syzokryli documentary.

The film business

"Dateline" introduced filmmaker Paul Maslak in the January 26 issue of The Weekly but failed to provide his Ukrainian background (as noted in a recent e-mail from a reader) or his film training. Reason: the information, through no fault of Mr. Maslak, arrived too late to be included in the story.

To make up, this "Dateline" is offering information about Mr. Maslak's Ukrainian ancestry and his early career, and for good measure, is presenting his views on how to break into the film business. He says there are roughly three ways.

One (usually the best way) is through the front doors of a major studio, talent agency or entertainment law firm, by getting hired as a youth into some entry-level administrative or clerical job, then working your way up through the ranks.

Another way: have a relative or mentor in the business who uses his/her influence to open a door for you (usually the easiest way). Witness all the offspring of entertainment families who became filmmakers - Sigourney Weaver, Rob Reiner, Jane/Peter/Brigitte Fonda, Ron Howard, Sean/Michael/Chris Penn, Charlie Sheen, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Hudson.

A third way is to break in through any and every unorthodox manner you can find, such as a fad cycle of specialty films that let in people from new fields. Examples of this method include dance movies, which gave entry to Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly; musicals, to Shirley Jones and Julie Andrews; comedies, to first vaudevillians like W.C. Fields and stand-ups like Jim Carrey. Muscle-man movies served Sly Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, while martial arts movies paved the way for Bruce Lee, Steven Seagal and Paul Maslak.

Mr. Maslak says he did not start out to be a filmmaker. "I drifted into an opportunity by dumb luck (perhaps that's providence) and only then decided to give it a try."

With a B.S. in business and public administration and a minor in journalism/English from the University of Maryland, he moved to California to be near his brother in the San Francisco area and began working in the manufacturing operations of an aerospace and computer electronics company. On the side, he wrote a theoretical book on martial arts, "Strategy in Unarmed Combat," analyzing the effectiveness of different fighting styles relative to physical stature, and freelanced magazine articles.

The book led to an offer to edit Inside Kung-Fu magazine on an after-hours basis, allowing Mr. Maslak to take a day job at Disney in San Francisco as a project planner on EPCOT and Tokyo Disneyland. During this period he met and interviewed many of Hong Kong's New Wave filmmakers, including Jackie Chan, as well as American filmmakers like film star Chuck Norris, director Hal Needham and screenwriters Joe Hyams and the late Sterling Silliphant.

He also set up a system of ratings for martial arts competition, which brought him a job as martial arts casting director when the Hong Kong producer who made Mr. Chan's first film decided to produce in the United States. Mr. Maslak helped cast Jean-Claude Van Damme's first theatrical film "No Retreat No Surrender."

With that experience, he began to work as a freelance story analyst, principally for HBO/Tri-Star Pictures. He started taking film school courses and screenwriting seminars, and audited acting classes. Using a few industry contacts, he began to find positions for friends from the martial arts world, a project that evolved into a management business.

Mr. Maslak joined forces with an established partner, Neva Friedenn. As managers, they developed screenplay projects for clients to help them get more work: they sold the story idea, a star or two and possibly the script at one fell swoop. Ultra-busy film executives were more likely to buy a story idea or a script when most of what they needed came in a package, saving them time and work.

His martial arts clients, who often had trouble with inexperienced independent directors who were unable to shoot a proper fight scene, asked him to show the directors a sensible approach. Using the knowledge he had picked up from director Yuen Kwai on "No Retreat No Surrender" and from interviews with other Hong Kong filmmakers, Mr. Maslak began teaching the directors about montage theory, camera speed and angles, best lenses and specialty camera moves.

This activity was noticed by famed "King of the B's" director Roger Corman (the "entry" door to the film industry for more than 60 Academy Award winners), who invited Mr. Maslak to work with him as an associate producer and direct fight sequences. Other independent producers followed suit and Mr. Maslak eventually directed entire films. But the story's not over yet.

Deciding that his temperament was better suited to producing, Mr. Maslak and his partner released their management clients and formed a production company in 1994 to produce the HBO World Premiere Movie "Red Sun Rising." They have been producing films together ever since then.

Mr. Maslak's conclusion: "I found that my background in manufacturing production control provided a more practical understanding of how to run a film production than did a film-school only background for other producers."

Oh, yes, his Ukrainian background. He is the son of the late Samuel Maslak, a first-generation Ukrainian American and onetime senior manager at the U.S. Census Bureau in Suitland, Md. His mother, Mary L. Maslak, a retired realtor and homemaker who lives in Raleigh, N.C., is from a Pennsylvania Dutch family whose forebears, originating in southern Germany, came to America about 1710.

Around town

Opening the 45th annual Grammy Awards at Madison Square Garden with Gwen Stefani and No Doubt on February 23, aerialists Tatyana Petruk and four other members of New York's Team AntiGravity performed on ropes hung from the ceiling. The five women dropped down simultaneously in a fantastic plunge, amazing the audience. Ms. Petruk, who also performed at Pinky's pre-Grammy party, says the hardest part of the performance was having to wait nine minutes, suspended from the ceiling, before the start of the act.

Grammy producers selected the women of AntiGravity for the Madison Square Garden show after seeing their stunning poses in an eight-page photo editorial in the February issue of Shape Magazine. Ms. Petruk, who was pictured at the Grammy Awards in last week's People magazine, tells me she and the other girls spent a full day with photographer Richard Corman shooting the Shape Magazine spread.
Gogol Bordello, the Gypsy punk band led by the gruff and extravagantly mustached Ukrainian singer, Eugene Hutz, performed its songs at Northsix in Brooklyn's Williamsburg section on February 28 and 29. Roaming the New York night club scene, the band translates Eastern European cabaret and works up to a frenetic oom-pah that's the makings of a rowdy party, says Jon Pareles in The New York Times.
Mariana Sadovska, well known to New York's Ukrainian audiences as a collector and singer of varied and evocative Ukrainian folk songs, was in New York last month. In mid-February she and Israeli singer Victoria Hanna joined forces with Fringe Theater director Ruth Kanner to create a new work-in-process titled "Callings" at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. Ms. Sadovska appeared with musicians Anthony Coleman and Doug Wieselman at the Club Europa in Brooklyn's Greenpoint section on February 28, reprising ancient music from Ukraine.
Surrounded by photos and posters displayed in the "Renaissance of Kyiv" exhibition at the Ukrainian Institute of America, Prof. Taras Hunczak spoke to a large audience about Kyiv's historic past on February 23. In addition to a hearty buffet, the afternoon event included a surprise: a newly arrived video, sent to UIA president Walter Nazarewicz by Kyiv Mayor Oleksander Omelchenko, showing the "Man of the Year" dinner, press conference and other events attended by the mayor when he visited New York in December. The exhibition, as well as the video, can be seen through the end of this month. Call (212) 228-8660 for information on viewing hours.

Helen Smindak's e-mail address is [email protected].

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